Shining Threads (3 page)

‘Let them fight it out between them, preferably in the stable yard,’ she would say wearily, eyeing their bloody noses with distaste, her attitude perhaps the result of the accidents,
some of them leading to death, and the floggings she herself had witnessed as a young spinner in the mill she now managed. It had not been unknown for an overlooker to break a child’s arm
with his leather thong, and her nephews’ bruises inflicted on one another seemed petty indeed when compared to the suffering, the real suffering which had once prevailed. Her own brother
Charlie had taken such a beating when younger than they. It had almost killed him and he bore the scars on his back and face to this day.

‘I can do anything I have to, Pearce Greenwood,’ Tessa remarked loftily, ‘
anything
, and that includes sewing a sampler if I put my mind to it, though I must admit
I’d rather fight a game-cock.’

‘Perhaps, little cousin, but you cannot beat me or Drew in a race to Greenacres. That little mare of yours is game but no match for my bay, or Drew’s.’

‘Fiddlesticks! I’m not talking about keeping to the tracks, you know. I mean whichever way any of us cares to take and if that frightens you then you have only to say so and we will
forget the whole thing.’

‘Now hold on, Tess. You cannot mean to gallop across the moorland. It’s as rough as hell out there and if one of the animals should put a foot in a rabbit hole or be faced with rocks
which . . .’

‘Well, of course, if you are not up to it . . .’

‘Of course we are, but . . .’

‘Then what are we waiting for?’

Pearce shrugged, then turned to grin at Drew who leaned indolently against the rock, his eyes half-shut against the sun, seemingly oblivious to the wrangling between his brother and cousin. He
was well used to this throwing down of the gauntlet by one or the other of them – a challenge which must be taken up if the scorn of the others was not to be endured. They loved the friction
which set the blood tingling, the dare which must be accepted. Wild as young colts, all three of them, daring and reckless, they gave no thought to danger, to risk, beyond a care for their nervous,
high-stepping mounts, to anything which might smack of caution. The brothers, young as they were, defied all comers at school, fighting back to back for the sheer joy of risking their handsome
faces, their fine young bodies against boys older and heavier than they, often over nothing more serious than the sorry cut of a fellow’s jacket.

‘What d’you say, Drew? Will we take her on? I know it’s a shame to risk her mare against our bays, but if she’s mad enough to do it who are we to deny her?’

The stretch of moorland from Badger’s Edge to Greenacres lay to the east of Crossfold and Edgeclough. It was rough terrain and uneven, about three miles mainly downhill and inhabited on
the ‘tops’ only by rabbit and stoat, curlew and magpie and wheatear. It was fit only for small animals and birds but within ten seconds of the signal, which was the dropping of
Tessa’s scarlet ribbon, they were all three soaring away from the sun which was beginning to lower itself towards the hills on the far side of the Penfold Valley.

Tessa could feel her mare start to take charge and she let her go, trusting her instincts, guiding her only generally in the direction of Greenacres. She could feel the intense excitement
vibrate through her own body and she knew she communicated it to her mount for the mare surged on as madly, as blindly as she herself did, not caring what came up before her, not seeing it, only
sensing the rapid approach of the scattered rocks, the dips and folds and hollows which must be traversed before she and the mare clattered into the stable yard. At no time did she even consider
that she might not get there, nor be the first home.

The mare nearly pulled her arms from their sockets and she flew like a wild bird, a bird knowing it should be alarmed at its own height and speed, and yet unwilling to return to earth and
safety. On and on, and at her back she could hear the frenzied yelping of the dogs, the thunder of her cousins’ mounts as they dashed over the stretch of grey rock. For a moment, as the mare
turned instinctively to avoid an outcrop of tumbled rocks higher than a man’s head, the sun was in her eyes and she was blinded but she let the animal take her round the rocks.

They came to a dry-stone wall, then another as they reached the lower ground for it was here that enclosure had made inroads upon the edge of the moors, and the mare rose lightly over each one,
her hooves not even clipping the crumbling stones. There was a cottage or two clustered in a hollow, sheltered from the cruel Pennine winds, and women and children stopped to stare in amazement,
then shook their heads and turned away since it was only the wild Greenwoods trying to kill themselves as usual.

Drew and Pearce raced a scant yard behind her, watching her back with fond pride for, really, was there another girl like her in the whole world? Her hair streamed out three feet behind her, a
banner of dark, burnished chestnut in the late afternoon sunshine. They were so close they could see the sweat stain the back of her shirt and hear her breath, ragged and urgent in her throat. She
was fearless, leaping shoulder-high rocks and wide, quite appalling chasms cut in the rough ground in her determination to be first home. She did not even look back so convinced was she that they
had been forced to drop behind, unable to keep up with her.

‘Shall we let her do it, brother?’ Pearce shouted, for really she deserved to win, but she heard him and her outrage exploded in her, flowing madly to every part of her body. With a
fierce shout she urged her mount on until the animal’s legs were no more than a dark blur against the grey and green of the moorland. The smell of gorse was everywhere and she thought she had
never been happier in her life. The wind created by her own speed and momentum slashed at her face and plastered her shirt against her chest. She could feel the animal beneath her strain harder and
harder. She could sense the heartbeat, like a rapid tattoo on a drum matching her own, and she threw back her head in joy, catching for a moment a glimpse of the tiny speck in the sky which was the
skylark wheeling in perfect grace above her. It was free, as she would be free, always. It flew high and wide allowing no man’s hand to capture it, filling its days with no employment other
than the ecstasy of living, being, breathing, its existence tied to nothing other than the next moment, and she would do the same.

She could hear the explosion of hoofbeats at her back and the sound of Drew’s voice, breathless and frantic as he realised that she might win, not by his allowing it but by her own
efforts, and a great shout of triumph erupted from between her lips. She could see the chimneys of Greenacres ahead of her among the magnificent trees which clustered about the house. Then she was
in them, galloping, moving as precisely as the bird in the sky as she guided her mare expertly between their enormous trunks. For a moment she had been sightless, coming from the brilliance of
sunlight into the dim and dappled softness of the trees, then she was through and beyond them was the gate into the stable yard at the back of the house. Walter, the stable lad, had heard her shout
and was running across the yard to open the gate but she could see he would not get there before she did. Not for a second did she hesitate. Up she went, she and her mare, up and up, high as a
man’s head. She was over with no more than an inch to spare, landing on the other side as lightly as drifting thistledown. There was the smell of steaming horseflesh and the sound of the
animal’s laboured breathing, the ring of its hooves on the cobbles, and for a timeless moment she was alone in the magic world she and the mare had just shared. Then they were there, Drew and
Pearce, crashing about the yard, their faces red and sweating, their eyes admiring, bestowing on her the accolade of acknowledging she was as good a horseman as any they knew, including
themselves.

Walter hovered on the fringe of the mêlée caused by the three overstrung horses, joined by Thomas and Jack, ready to lead the animals away when they were told. On the faces of all
three grooms was an expression of resigned acceptance which said quite clearly they were of the opinion that none of the young people would make old bones! They strode off laughing, arm in arm, and
though Drew and Pearce were taller than she was, and six months older, they looked considerably younger. They were boyish, their faces almost formed in that curious way of males who are not quite
men. Tessa, on the other hand, though only sixteen, was completely a woman, even if her appearance at the moment belied it.

Charlie Greenwood glanced about the dinner table at his family. They were all there this evening. His brother Joss, down from Westminster, splendidly handsome in his evening black and white, his
hair still thick and curling about his head but where it had once been dark as a gypsy’s, now it was threaded generously with white. Commanding of eye and well used to moving amongst all
classes of men from the operatives in the mill to the Prime Minister, the great Lord Aberdeen himself, Joss was as usual no more than an arm’s length from his serenely smiling wife,
Katherine, their hands, or so it appeared to Charlie, to be forever hovering, each ready, should it be needed, to give loving support to the other. Their devotion had once been the talk of the
Penfold Valley; anyone in their company was immediately conscious of their apparent inability to be more than a yard or two apart and of the secret and sometimes disconcerting smiles they
constantly exchanged, but now, after twenty years of a marriage which most had said would not last, their passion for one another was unabated.

Kit Greenwood turned to her husband, her own glossy hair slipping from the intricate chignon her maid had devised, as it had done for as long as Charlie could remember, and his brother put out a
tender hand to tuck the straying tendril behind her ear. Her eyes, the same violet-blue as her two sons’, softened as they looked at Joss, as they did for no one else, and her silken gown,
simple, stylish and extremely expensive, Charlie knew, matched their colour exactly. She had amethysts in her ears and at her throat and looked ten years younger than her actual age which Charlie
knew to be forty-eight. Indeed, her own daughter, Laurel, who was Charlie’s wife and in her twenty-ninth year, they calculated, looked scarcely younger. Of course, she was still grieving the
loss of their fifth child and could not be expected to be as sleek and glowing as her mother, who was not really her mother for Laurel had been adopted, as had his own sister, Jenny, as a child of
four or five.

Poor Laurel, though a stranger looking at Laurel Greenwood would be hard pressed to understand why Charlie should think that about his wife. She wore a gown which was fashionable and obviously
expensive. There were pearls at her throat and in her ears, lustrous and costly, and in the room about her were the luxurious trappings bought by the wealth of which she was a part. But she was a
part only by adoption, which was where the trouble lay. Until she was five years old or thereabouts she had laboured in the Chapman mills, abused and starved, and indelibly printed in her mind was
the memory of those years though she did not consciously recognise it. She had longed all her life, from the day she had been old enough to shape the thought, to be as
they
were, to be
them
, if you like. She yearned to be as carelessly confident of the security which was theirs as were her brothers and cousin, to have a
proper
place in the order of things, not by
gift but by
right
. She felt she had not and it had eaten into her so that she was tense and insecure, afflicted with the deadly and completely irrational fear of a return to the terror she
had known as a child. It made her sour, envious and uncomfortable to live with. Charlie loved her, made allowances for her and wished his niece and nephews could do the same.

What a labyrinth of relationships his family was, Charlie thought, as he watched his sister, who was not really his sister, lean forward into the candlelight, emphasising a point she was making
with the flat of her hand on the polished table-top. Joss and himself were true brothers, but Jenny was a foundling and, like her daughter Tessa, whom he and Joss called niece, and Laurel, his
wife, was no blood relation at all.

But Drew and Pearce Greenwood were. They were true Greenwoods for all to see. Not quite seventeen years old and from the moment they were born they had been thorns in the flesh of everyone
– as they had been today, he had been told – from the lowest scullery maid who had the continual scrubbing of the muddy tracks they made wherever they marched their imperious boots, to
their own father who was as determined to make businessmen of them as they were to avoid it. Lusty, brawling babies they had been, terrifying their nursery maids with their devilment from the
moment they had been able to get up on their sturdy, well-fed legs and strut like young lordlings doing whatever
they
wanted to do. Laurel had been eleven or so at the time, a quiet child as
he remembered, made that way by her beginnings in life, at peace in the schoolroom with Miss Copeland and in the nursery with Flora who had once been her nurse. It had been as though a whirlwind
had descended, since Tessa Harrison was born only a scant six months behind them. New nursery maids and a full-time nanny had been engaged to order them about, and Flora too, who had not cared for
it after seven years with the placid Laurel, nor for the constant demands, arrogant and made with the utter certainty that they would be immediately attended to, of one wilful girl child and two
rowdy boys who were as alike as two leaves on a branch. The noise and complete devastation had driven Laurel and Miss Copeland to shut themselves up, to
lock
themselves up in the schoolroom,
but even there, a year or two later, her brothers and cousin were knocking on the door demanding to be let in, saying this was
their
schoolroom,
their
house,
their
pencil and
ruler and book. What a trial they had been, the three of them, and still were to her, Charlie knew, as she did her best to run the household with the same precision he and Jenny ran the
business.